General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.

The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. "GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions--it's legal," Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE's profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn't taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.

"I asked the GE tax officer, 'How long was your tax form?'" Ryan said. "He said, 'Well, we file electronically, we don't measure in pages.'" Ryan asked for an estimate, which came back at a stunning 57,000 pages. When Ryan relayed the story at the townhall meeting in Janesville, there were audible gasps from the crowd.

"Most paper is made from pine trees, so I went out in the woods and looked at some pines.

Most are about 1 foot in diameter and 60 feet tall. Ignoring taper, that's about 81,430 cubic inches of wood:

pi * radius2 * length = volume

3.14 * 62 * (60 * 12) = 81,430
3.14 * 62 * (60 * 12) = 81,430

I have a 2x4-foot piece of lumber in the backyard. It weighs about 10 pounds and contains 504 cubic inches of wood. That means a pine tree weighs roughly 1,610 pounds (81430/504 * 10).

I know that in manufacturing paper, the wood is turned into pulp. The yield is about 50 percent -- about half of the tree is knots, lignin and other stuff that is no good for paper. So that means a pine tree yields about 805 pounds of paper. I have a ream of paper for a photocopier here and it weighs about 5 pounds and contains 500 sheets (you often see paper described as "20-pound stock" or "24-pound stock" -- that is the weight of 500 sheets of 17" x 22" paper). So, using these measurements, a tree would produce (805/5 * 500) 80,500 sheets of paper.

These are all fairly rough estimations, and I weighed things on a bathroom scale..... "

It would be pretty funny to drop off a 60 ft pine tree at the IRS and tell them "Here ya go. You figure it out."

Its just another example of how excess rules and regulations screw the little guy, there is no way the IRS is going to dedicate a few hundred agents to audit that, but you can bet your ass that Ma and Pa who own the local coffee shop will be getting audited should they forget to dot the I's or cross the T's.